Birx: we deceived you in order to get you to comply
Well, at least she admitted it:
Remember how "two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into months of lockdowns?
This was by design.
It was never about "flattening the curve."
This was a lie.
In her memoir, Deborah Birx, the architect of the "flatten the curve" strategy, admits this openly: pic.twitter.com/kjV0lhoELF
— Kevin Bass PhD MS (@kevinnbass) May 29, 2023
Birx’s book came out a year ago April, but I missed its details at the time. This writer reviewed it shortly after and continues the same quote:
At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done—a tall order. We were playing a game of chess in which the success of each move was predicated on the one before it…
At this point, I wasn’t about to use the words lockdown or shutdown. If I had uttered either of those in early March, after being at the White House only one week, the political, nonmedical members of the task force would have dismissed me as too alarmist, too doom-and-gloom, too reliant on feelings and not facts. They would have campaigned to lock me down and shut me up.
That made it necessary to deceive those stupidheads.
Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude. In the meantime, I waited for the blowback, for someone from the economic team to call me to the principal’s office or confront me at a task force meeting. None of this happened.
What arrogance from people like Birx whose job it is to advise on the science, not to deceive officials and the public in order to close down a society because Birx et al happen to think it would be a good idea. The horrendous results of that decision as weighed against a small or probably nonexistent benefit are now obvious.
Birx’s previous experience was with HIV/AIDS (see this), and she makes a preposterous, non-evidence-based comparison of condoms to prevent HIV transmission to masks to prevent COVID transmission. This is a scientist?
And back when the country as a whole was no longer being locked down but states varied greatly in their own lockdown policies, Birx was still hard at her work of deception:
After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit…
Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.
The author of the article comments:
Most of the book consists of her explaining how she headed a kind of shadow White House dedicated to keeping the country in some form of lockdown for as long as possible. In her telling, she was the center of everything, the only person truly correct about all things, given cover by the VP and assisted by a handful of co-conspirators…
It’s very clear that Birx had almost no contact with any serious scientist who disputed the draconian response, not even John Iaonnidis who explained as early as March 17, 2020, that this approach was madness. But she didn’t care: she was convinced that she was in the right, or, at least, was acting on behalf of people and interests who would keep her safe from persecution or prosecution.
I cannot imagine Birx ever changing her opinion.
Now the name Deborah Birx will induce the gag reflex.
Gag, shudder, barf– she grew up in my home county and graduated from Lampeter-Strasburg High School. She then went to an undistinguished college and second-tier medical school. Birx worked in Fauci’s lab between 1983 and 1986, which may be where she contracted Tony’s ego infection.
And she, and all the others, including Fauci, will never be prosecuted, or pay any sort of penalty for their crimes. Yes, crimes of deceiving, lying, and causing huge economic harm. Also the mental harm of people being locked down and the societal upheaval that resulted, and that we are still experiencing.
She, Fauci et al should go down in history as true criminals.
See also “A Plague on Our House” by Dr Scott Atlas for a view of Birx consistent with this post. She was a piece of work. The “meta” problem, however, was that Trump left the covid response (taskforce) to Pence, who comes across as deer-in-the-headlights in his response to Birx et al. Although favorable overall to Trump, Atlas indicates that Trump was figuring out what was going on but ultimately didn’t interfere with the Pence taskforce.
another piece of the puzzle
https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1663530785792487427?cxt=HHwWhsCzgfObhpYuAAAA
i used to think they were merely callously indifferent, but they have revealed they are pure evil, how they tormented and killed with their draconian praxis,
Despicable.
Hubris ultimately leads to evil.
She was morally defective to begin with. Then she got power. And convinced herself that she was qualified to play God with the lives of other people. Evil.
And note — she can’t claim she deserves forgiveness saying she acted in good faith. There is no reason to ever give her any wiggle room at all. She needs to be held accountable. Even if she truly believed that what she was advocating and ordering was the right thing to do, her deceit eliminates any resort to that excuse. By lying and deceiving, she made the decision that she and her fellow deceitful conspirators now OWN what happened. When it turned out she was wrong, she has to be held accountable for ALL the harm she and they caused by being wrong.
She can’t claim she acted in good faith when her dishonesty and deceit establish that she didn’t act in good faith.
Btw — if it is a crime to lie to the FBI and a lot of other officials, why isn’t it a crime to deliberately deceive the president,
Congress and the public about a matter of this importance. At a minimum, she should lose any pension and any salary paid during Covid.
I also read Scott Atlas’ book. She and her little cabal refused to look at any of the epidemiology literature he tried to get them to read. Also, she went to states to try to get governors to shut down.
Come stroll with me down memory lane nearly 10 years ago now, only 6½ years from then until the start of the pandemic. It was a landmark harbinger of deceptions to come:
“[MIT Professor Jonathan] Gruber said the bill was deliberately written ‘in a tortured way’ to disguise the fact that it creates a system by which ‘healthy people pay in and sick people get money’. He said this obfuscation was needed due to ‘the stupidity of the American voter’ in ensuring the [Obamacare] bill’s passage. Gruber said the bill’s inherent ‘lack of transparency is a huge political advantage’ in selling it.”
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gruber_(economist)
And I wonder if the increase in vaccinations required is tied to the increase in autism.
From 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 35.
Four years ago I trusted our medical establishment to think that’s a fringe, crazy idea.
Now, I’m not sure. My trust is near zero.
Reference:
https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson/status/1662886713167949826?cxt=HHwWhMC9gfip4ZMuAAAA
“I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Ray SoCa:
No it’s not.
See this.
“she, and all the others, including Fauci, will never be prosecuted, or pay any sort of penalty for their crimes.” physicsguy
As all here realize, our ‘institution’s near total corruption ensures that nothing will be done, which only leaves available ‘extra’ legal measures. But resorting to those ‘measures’ would be an implicit admission that America’s Constitution has become a dead letter. So instead, we do nothing beyond complaining to those complicit in the corruption. Consequence; the manifestation of Edmund Burke’s admonition; “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing.”
The bottom line is that Birx and Fauci were both government functionaries who would just as happily oppress
And Pence and Trump failed at their jobs.
Birx and Fauci are MDs, as was Josef Mengele.
I would welcome a committee of experts in public health, infectious diseases, medical treatments, economics, and medical ethics to do an in-depth study of the management of the pandemic. Yes, they should place blame where due, but mostly look at what went well and what was obviously bad. Present a blueprint for doing a much better job in managing future pandemics.
Those who misused their power for ill should be shamed and their reputations sullied at the very least. Prosecutions? Maybe. With better guidelines for managing public health crises and more accountability for the managers, the next pandemic might be handled more open-mindedly and transparently.
Right now, the CDC, Democrat governors, many medical centers are still thinking they did a good job. An in-depth study might wake them up.
This really isn’t a criminal matter. Frankly, it is the left that would try to shoehorn something like this into some vague fraud statute. Behavior like that of Birx and Fauci is a good demonstration of how you can have democracy or a power administrative state, but not both. The solution to government power to behaves like that is to vote them out. But you can’t vote out the bureaucrats.
Republicans really need to dismantle the administrative state with the same zeal that they have tried to lower taxes in the past. If you think that Trump is going to do that, remember that all of this happened under Trump’s nose. (And if the Indiana RFRA debacle wasn’t enough to disqualify Pence in 2024, this really should do it.)
Bauxite:
The Supreme Court will be looking at some cases relevant to the administrative state soon and will have a chance to at least somewhat curb its power.
neo – I’m all for a revival of the non-delegation doctrine and an end of Chevron. I think those things are necessary, but not sufficient.
I think the problem is that the federal government has been acting outside the original understanding of the Constitution for nearly a century now, since the New Deal. Reigning it in is going to require action on multiple fronts. (And Democrats will do their best to to undo every reform any time they control the federal government.)
Birx inspires a new descriptive term, which can be applied to many of the current crop of totalitarians: narcissistic fascist.
There. She did one good thing with her life.
Twas a scarf that did in Isadora.
Deborah may strangle on her own mendacity.
JJ said, “Right now, the CDC, Democrat governors, many medical centers are still thinking they did a good job.”
It’s not just the medical/public health big shots who need to be put in the stocks– it’s their political allies like the teachers’ unions. Rochelle Walensky has been asked “to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic next month about the influence nongovernmental groups such as teachers unions had over public health mandates during the outbreak. . . . The subcommittee requested Walensky’s presence following testimony from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who informed Congress in April that she and the director spoke directly by phone and communicated about CDC policy regarding school reopening guidelines in early 2021. . . . Walensky’s testimony may further shed light on the relationship. Weingarten, for instance, revealed in her congressional testimony that the Biden transition team communicated with her in late 2020 and early 2021 — before the commander-in-chief even entered office.”
https://nypost.com/2023/05/30/outgoing-cdc-chief-rochelle-walensky-to-testify-before-house-covid-panel-over-who-pushed-mandates/
To update a certain French song from 1793:
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,
Les bureaucrates à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira,
Les bureaucrates, on les pendra!
(huxley will be pleased to know that French has indeed borrowed “bureaucrate” from English, and one French dictionary defines the word as “fonctionnaire qui abuse de son pouvoir.”)
Probably a matter of either:
– Really now! Why should Fauci get all the credit??
…and/or…
– ANYTHING a man can do a woman can do BETTER!!
(At least we now know why she TRULY UNDERSTOOD that it was PERFECTLY OK—for HER—to visit her dear mother, when was it? over Thanksgiving?… Of course for the rest of us, heh, “Let ‘em eat lockdowns…”)
In all fairness, though, Dr. Deborah is just a creature of her times.
Or a doc AHEAD of her time?
Or “just following orders”…perhaps?
In any event, an EXEMPLARY member (though she might have thought of adding some copious weeping to her repertoire) of the glorious F-team initiating that—“Follow-the-Science”(TM)—trial run…that’s right! In preparation for “The Next Best Thing”? (with apologies to Steve Jobs)…
“Fourth Reich disseminates ominous new report on ‘environmental policy’ “—
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/fourth_reich_disseminates_ominous_new_report_on_environmental_policy.html
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
And as long as we’re talking about “CONSPIRACY THEORIES”….
…why not go the whole hog??
“To Address The Loneliness Epidemic, The Feds Want To Control Your Town And Friends”—
https://tinyurl.com/mv5976hk
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
Key phrase: “Ministry of Loneliness”
(Sounds like it might well morph into the “Ministry of Misery”…)
Neo – pre Covid I would have agreed with you 100%.
I agree with you the diagnosis has become a lot more looser. And an issue mentioned in this thread or the one you linked to of drug use by a pregnant Mother. Plus the older the parents the higher chances of issues. And more parents are delaying having children. Plus I would guess increased screen time for young children has an impact on cognitive development (for example tv shows love to keep changing views to attract our eyes / brains).
Another view by Steve Kirch with the point the data is not available, which is just like the Covid “vaccines”.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/the-data-is-clear-the-more-vaccines
And looking at the Cdc vaccine guidelines there has been a huge increase in the number required of vaccines from when we were kids, and it even includes the flu vaccine!
Birx is just a recent example of C.S. Lewis’s moral busybodies. She lied to us for our own good. Trusting Birx, and Fauci, is perhaps Trump’s biggest failure as POTUS.
Ray SoCal – Don’t forget that correlation does not imply causation:
https://www.statology.org/correlation-does-not-imply-causation-examples/
In other news, a recent study showed that receiving more COVID jabs correlated to a higher risk of catching COVID. Whoops!
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofad209/7131292?login=false
How did the smartest people in the room not realize that pedaling falsehoods and smearing the truth as a “conspiracy theory” would lead to a renaissance of actual conspiracy theories? The whole “conspiracy theory” label is really just a fallacious appeal to authority. It’s actually not a bad rule of thumb, as long as the authority is trustworthy and honest. Well, goodbye to all that.
I ran across a good quote from Upton Sinclair recently: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
‘How did the smartest people in the room not realize that pedaling falsehoods and smearing the truth as a “conspiracy theory” would lead to a renaissance of actual conspiracy theories?’
Let’s try this:
Because the “smartest people in the room” planned to do everything possible to attain total power—including control over information (including “mis-/dis-/mal-information” and the economy…along with people’s access to that economy and their ability to support themselves); and when one holds total power one doesn’t have to worry about such piddling things as “the people” or their opinions, or laws, or optics, or truth…or elections?
OR REALITY…
of course it’s a criminal matter, brownstone institute thoroughly eviscerated birx when this apologia came out,
yes shes like feely ferguson, the apparatchik that brought misery to the uk, one is reminded in kingsman, the global warming advocate, played by mark hamill was also from imperial college,
Barry Meislin – Keeping all of this under wraps would have required Orwellian “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia” levels of power. That’s what amazes me.
Of course it was going to come out at some point that the lab leak theory was plausible, and even likely. Of course it was going to come out that the Hunter Biden laptop was real. Of course it was going to come out that Russian collusion was a Clinton dirty trick abetted by the FBI. Of course it was going to come out that masks were more or less useless. Of course it was going to come out the COVID vaccine boosters were launched without any effectiveness testing.
We’re not doing great on the freedom front, but we’re not in 1984-land yet. And the elites pushing this nonsense should have realized that.
But really, they’re not even trying to hide it. Birx and Fauci have both publicy admitted their lies. And both seem to think that they deserve a medal for their “service” to the rest of us!)
miguel cervantes – What criminal statute did Birx violate?
“…perhaps Trump’s biggest failure as POTUS.”
Well, OK.
But let’s think about this a bit.
Should Trump, in his wildest, day-glo-orange imagination have suspected that his political opponents would promote policies that would knowingly sacrifice the health of the country—hurting its men, women and children, destroying its economy—in order to achieve political advantage? In order to destroy him politically?
Would any of us have believed it?
The answer, of course, is—perhaps—well maybe not at first…but—YES!—at some point towards the middle of 2020, things were indeed becoming increasingly suspicious:
The claims that NO OTHER therapeutic avenues were available aside from the vaccine that was being developed! Really?
That hydrochloroquine’s effectiveness was only “ANECDOTAL”! Really?
That shutting down was the only way! Really?
That masking up was absolutely imperative FOR EVERYONE! Really?
That Ivermectin was really a dangerous Horse Remedy! Really?
(And Trump got sucked into this. Remember: Operation Warp Speed was HIS baby. Was he going to defy the “experts”? COULD HE?)
Nonetheless, by mid=summer, Trump, sniffing a rat, appointed Scott Atlas.
And look at what happened to Atlas: tarred and feathered by all the self-acclaimed “experts” and media ghouls. Fired upon from all directions.
Conclusion: Should Trump have bucked the trend and the tsunami of publicly—practically GLOBALLY!—mandated policies of disaster?
Could he have?
Not sure that even Trump could have done it.
And yet, I suppose, one MIGHT conclude—in hindsight—that yes, he should have.
In HINDSIGHT.
P.S. And they’re STILL lying. Still claiming that the virus originated from natural origins. Still saying that people—that youngsters—REQUIRE the vaccine, etc.
File under: Harmageddon.
they had conspired at that 2019 wargame, to lockdown and push vaccines, they created the wetmarket and other fraud charges, john hopkins and rockefeller foundation as well the cdc all colluded, to deprive the liberty and ultimately the lives of hundreds of thousands of persons, restraint of trade, I’m sure there are plenty of statutes that apply,
it would be a shorter list to consider what statutes weren’t violated,
“Of course…”
Of course Russiagate was going to be exposed from top to bottom and the perpetrators caught?
Of course it was going to come out that the election was stolen?
Of course it was going to come out that Jan. 6 was an intricate Democratic Party/Deep-State frame-up?
Well, maybe you’re right…
remember when they were all concerned that tucker was hoarding the j6 footage, pepperidge farm remembers, of course there is even more evidence of the fraud in arizona on video, the kind they have sanctioned kari lake, for not having
meanwhile mayor adams, declares you have a right to be fat
The pursuit of flabbiness.
(It’s in the Declaration, I believe.)
The Powers That Be saw the lockdowns as a golden opportunity to change society and advance their cultural/politcal/economic agenda.
Related (sorta):
“The medical field is erasing its own COVID-era history.”—
https://instapundit.com/587267/
“…As much as the government probably wishes you would [forget], most of you have hopefully not forgotten how “The Science” unfolded over the course of the pandemic. Pfizer and the rest of the Big Pharma companies assured the government that everything was just fine with the vaccines…. And the government dutifully reported the cheerful news to us, while using all of that “data” to impose lockdowns, mask mandates, and immunity passport systems. But as we have since learned, there really wasn’t all that much testing going on…. And now, according to one group that tracks publications in scientific journals, a lot of the original research and test results are mysteriously disappearing….”
Yep. Follow the science…down the rabbit hole… (if you can)…
In a triple act with Fauci and Redfield, she’s destroyed the credibility of public health mavens and induced people to distrust their doctors as well.
NB, the CDC should be broken up into about a half-dozen pieces and the management of both the CDC and the FDA fired. Nothing will be done, of course.
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And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for those damn kids!
Speaking of stupidheads, Birx writes about how her policies were based in large measure on the early reports coming out of China and on those videos of people just falling down dead in the streets. Videos which even a stupidhead like me immediately spotted as ridiculous fakes. But (I think this was noted by Scott Atlas) those videos had already been PROVEN to be fakes long before Birx wrote her book—yet she still cites to them.
Yup, real scientists should just believe in the truth and efficacy of whatever the Chinese government says or does. The same country that, even now, insists on spraying down streets with disinfectants to stop Covid.
To follow-up on Birx’s heavy, inexplicable reliance on China’s early propaganda in evaluating the severity of the pandemic, see Michael Senger’s article at the Brownstone Institute’s website, Deborah Birx’s Guide to Destroying a Country From Within https://brownstone.org/articles/deborah-birxs-guide-to-destroying-a-country-from-within/
“So just to recap, here we have Deborah Birx—the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong Covid lockdowns, silencing anyone who disagreed with her, to the incessant praise of mainstream media outlets—telling us she’d been inspired by all those images of Wuhan residents falling dead and constructing a hospital in 10 days, and still didn’t realize they were fake two years after they’d been proven fake.
And that’s just Chapter 1.”